048: Barack Obama – If you are hitting all of your marks

“If you are hitting all of your marks, that means you didn’t set them high enough.” – Barack Obama

This was drawn by Nizar86. Check out his other work too!

With the 2016 Presidential Race slowly heating up, I thought we’d ‘weight in’ with a quote from President Barack Obama himself. He needs no introduction. You can even find a wealth of information about him through all the books written about him.

This quote came from an interview he had. You can check it out here.

I’m have no place to comment on the presidential race. Instead, I want to talk about goal setting.

The goal setting debate

Goal setting is a pretty tricky thing to do. Even after reading so much about it, it still seems unclear to me. On one hand, we have people championing S.M.A.R.T. goal setting. Where goals should be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely.

On the other hand, you have people who say you should shoot for the moon, take action, and see what happens. This is similar to Obama’s quote, and the ideology from the book, The Magic of Thinking Big. The school of thought here is that no matter how big the goal, effort and action will fill it in. Therefore, you might as well dream as big as you want.

I have never been able to fully reconcile these two schools of goal setting thought together. It looks like it will always be one or the other. Yes, just like the presidential elections, two people, from two sides, vying for one spot.

However, I do think both goal setting methods are valid, and should be applied to different people in different situations. If you are an optimist or a driven person, or are in a project with nothing to lose, then by all means, shoot for the moon. If you are a cautious person or a  skeptic, or are in a project that has high stakes, then S.M.A.R.T. goals are better for you.

Goals at Rational Comics

In the case of Rational Comics (RC). I have set the goal of 1000 subscribers by this December. I thought it was a big stretch goal,but I had friends tell me it was too small a goal. Either way, I didn’t plan any ‘mini-goals’ to achieve between 0 to 1000 subscribers. I just thought we’d ride all the way to out objectives. Currently, we are at 217 subscribers, with 3 months left before December. Not such a smooth ride to the objective as I thought. But, it’s been a good ride. I’ve had a lot of experiences growing RC, and I’m still very glad about the boost in readers we had in July.

Let’s hit the goal of 1000 subscribers together. Subscribe today and receive our comic updates as well as a free, limited edition, printable poster!

I hope you too can achieve the goals you set for yourself. If you have a story about goal setting, or have an opinion about how to set goals, let me know in the comments below.